User talk:Teratornis/How Wikipedia defeats Brooks' law

Evidence?

Hi Teratornis:

I'm wondering is there evidence that Wikipedia defies Brooks law? Wanderer57 (talk) 19:37, 27 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

We can track the growth of Wikipedia's users and edits. If Brooks' law holds on Wikipedia, Wikipedia should be getting measurably less efficient as the number of active users increases. Wikipedia has probably doubled in size and activity since I started editing in 2006, and I cannot detect any decrease in efficiency. Rather, Wikipedia seems to be more efficient, for example on the Help desk where the tools for answering questions keep improving (now we have the Editor's index, more Help desk templates, {{Help desk searches}}, etc.). However, rigorously measuring Wikipedia's efficiency would be difficult. One measure might be the amount of time a new user must spend to get up to speed, but this varies so much with the user, it would be hard to compare the difficulty over the years. --Teratornis (talk) 22:48, 1 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]